Off the Grid (5 page)

7

E
lbow Lake was still this mild Sunday morning, its glassy surface scattered with pink diamonds from the rising sun. This was the quiet time, when only the water spoke, in hushed burbles that gently woke the world around it.

A V-shaped flock of migrating geese was the first to break the early-morning silence, honking overhead, looking for a place to rest their wings after flying the red-eye on their way south for the winter. A loon uttered a haunting cry from Spider Bay, calling its brethren to do the same before the weather turned.

This was the one place on the reservation Chief Bellanger always came to when the world threatened to suck all the peace right out of him.

It was maybe the worst thing about being Chief of Tribal Police. He got all the bad news long before anyone else, and there was a large loneliness in that. The first call this morning had come from Bully Bad Heart Bull. They weren’t close, exactly, but the Chief had given him a training slot on the Tribal Police Force back when he’d been rejected by every branch of the service because of a skin condition. Bully had been a gawky, tall kid then, subject to boils, and damn near suicidal because he couldn’t enlist with the rest of his friends to become a modern warrior for his tribe and his country.

Within a year, the boils were gone, he’d filled out some, got some policing experience under his belt, and the Minneapolis PD was willing to look at him. As a Native American, he was an ideal liaison for the tribal community clustered in the city, and he was there still. He’d never forgotten the boost up the ladder Chief had given him; thus, the call. But it wasn’t a good one.

I found one of the kidnapped Sand Lake girls this morning, Chief. Aimee Sergeant. She was murdered.

Chief had just closed his eyes and tightened his grip on the phone while he listened to the gruesome details.
Did you call Sand Lake?

The Feds took care of that, and MPD. They don’t like beat cops spreading that kind of word. But I remembered you were tight with the Sand Lake Chief. Thought you might want to give him a call.

Thanks, Bully.

There’s another thing. The BCA lead thinks Aimee ran to save the others.

A little warrior.

Yeah. Something Sand Lake can hang on to.

And so, Chief had made his condolence call and then gone to the lake, where things made a lot more sense than a little girl ending up dead in a vacant lot.

His canoe cut soundlessly through the water, along the margins of tall grass near the shore. He was pleased to see some of the seed heads swelling with wild rice. It would be prime for harvest in another week, when he would enlist his cousin Moose to paddle while he knocked the ripe grain into the bottom of the canoe.

His “Old Woman,” as he affectionately called his wife of thirty-two years, would then weigh and bag the rice to sell to the two local gas stations, the scant tourist roadside stands, and the casino on the northern border of Elbow Lake Reservation. Their share of the proceeds would be their mad money for the year, never much, but enough to blow without guilt on a nice dinner and a few games at the Golden Eagle Bingo Hall.

Not that they hurt financially. But if you were an Indian who’d grown up on the rez fifty-some years ago—and both of them were—you learned the prudence of frugality pretty much from weaning. You also learned the importance of continuing tradition, whether the motivation was sheer practicality or cultural pride and preservation.

Chief dipped his paddle and created a whirlpool of resistance in the water that slowed and finally stopped the canoe; better to see the pink diamonds of sunrise transform to a flawless chromium white as the sky lightened. He absently reached into the thicket of rice to pull the seeds for closer examination, and smiled when a few long, pale gray
mahnomen
sifted into his open palm. It was going to be a good ricing year.

Rice had always been such a prominent part of his life—the best and the worst—a source of joy for him, from boyhood on, the worst part coming a little later. Those bad memories didn’t ever taint the happiness he felt with the coming of each season, but ricing time was also the one and only time of the year he ever thought about the war, so many decades in his past now. He’d tried to separate his experiences, but had finally given in to the fact that they were inextricably linked. Good always came with bad, and as the sun lifted high enough to warm his shoulders, he was transported back in time and place.

His spirit guide was a bear—Mukwa in his native language—and Mukwa suddenly visited him in a dream on a September night under a full moon—a Wild Rice Moon, his people called it—in the middle of a rice paddy on the way to Khe Sahn. It seemed meaningful, appropriate, even though the rice in Vietnam wasn’t even remotely related to his native grass.

Mukwa didn’t stay long before he disappeared back into his dream, just long enough to tell him that there were many roads to the High Place. Upon waking, he made the decision that he didn’t want to go to the High Place. Not yet. And he didn’t want his friend to go there, either. It wasn’t their time, and this wasn’t their road.

He poked the man dozing at his side. “Claude.”

But Claude didn’t wake up; he just grunted and rolled over in the wet, composted mash of their foxhole.

“Hey. Chimookman. White man. Wake up.”

Claude still wouldn’t rouse. No surprise—when he slept, you could bash him over the head with an oil barrel and you’d be lucky to see his eyes flutter.

So he grabbed his weapon and furtively made his way up to the berm and out into the jungle, because the way he had been taught, your spirit guide didn’t talk to you unless you had a job to do . . .

Chief was startled back to the present when a tasty-looking cluster of fat mallards flushed skyward from the reeds, damn near next to him. He should have thought to bring his bird gun.

When he pulled into his driveway shortly after noon, Old Woman, whose given name was actually Noya—a nod to the distant Inuit Eskimo roots on her mother’s side that had probably sprouted during the Alaska Gold Rush—was already up and busy in the garden, harvesting the last of the fall crops. She was hacking down tall stalks of Brussels sprouts, tossing them next to a pile of winter squash she’d already picked. The woman loved to garden, and she was good at it. Unfortunately, that meant another healthy meal on the lunch table today.

When she heard the truck, she straightened and waited for him to come to her. If you wanted to talk to Noya, you went right up to her and did it face-to-face. There was no hollering from room to room because you were too lazy to get up and walk the distance, and certainly no raised voices out in the yard where others might overhear and mistake it for anger.

Chief hadn’t understood that in the early days of their marriage—why walk ten yards when you could just call over the noise of the TV to ask when dinner was ready? It had taken her less than a week to train him, simply by refusing to reply until he was standing right in front of her, and then, she rewarded him with her magical smile that instantly righted all things wrong in the world. It was a smile worth much more than ten yards—it was a smile worth a walk to the moon and back.

And she was smiling at him now, which seemed a little strange considering the bad news they’d received about Aimee. “Bully called again. He found the other four girls alive.”

Chief shoved his hands in his pockets and looked down at the frost-nipped plants in the garden. It was hard to find happiness in your heart when a little girl was dead; and hard not to when four others had been saved. Good and bad, he reminded himself, feeling Noya’s firm hand on his arm.

“Come in the house,” she said gently. “I’ll make you Brussels sprout soup to make you feel better.”

Now he could smile, just a little. He hated Brussels sprouts, and she knew it.

As they walked arm in arm toward the house, Noya asked, “What time are Joe and Claude coming?”

“Later this afternoon. I’ll head to the cabin after lunch and get things set up, but you know they won’t give me the time of day until they see you first, so expect some visitors.”

“I’d be furious if they didn’t stop to see me first.”

Chief looked over at his wife. Her long braid danced across her back in time with her gait. It was still mostly black, unlike his own braid, which was mostly gray, but he did notice some pale hairs shooting out through her long, carefully done plait. “Now tell me what’s really for lunch, Old Woman.” He nudged her in the spot just under her rib cage that always made her burble out a cute giggle—the same one she’d always had, since way back in elementary school. Funny how every single thing about a human aged as time passed, except for the laugh. It made Chief think that the Creator, if there was one, had a damn fine sense of humor.

“You’re getting a boneless, skinless chicken breast today, old man.”

Chief wasn’t fat, but he was very large in stature, and he suffered the same post-middle-age paunch most men of his vintage did. “You trying to deflate these Chippewa air bags or something?” he asked, patting his belly.

Noya tipped her head, her lips curling into that smile, which made him happy. Oh yes, he’d charmed her yet again, even after all these years. It was one of his greatest pleasures in life.

8

M
agozzi got the call from Bully just as he and Gino were leaving the vacant lot where Aimee Sergeant had died. “Good news,” he said to Gino as he hung up. “Bully found the other four girls alive, locked in a back room in a house over on Camden Street.”

Gino let out a relieved sigh. “Are they okay?”

“As okay as they can be, considering what they’ve been through. They’re on their way to the hospital. But the two men who were holding them are dead in the house—somebody shot them—so we’re not done with Little Mogadishu just yet.”

Gino grunted. “Even better news. Two flesh trade gangsters just got eliminated from the petri dish. And when we find out who did that fine civic duty, we’ll roast them, too, because they’re part of the same bad protoplasm.”

Magozzi lit up the tires on the Caddie as he pulled away from Barrington Industrial Park and headed east down Riverside toward Camden. It was a weird crime scene. The yellow tape was strung around the house and yard, but other than a single squad parked at the curb, the site was deserted. No rubbernecking neighbors, no media, no patrols rolling in with sirens and lights.

They pulled in behind the squad, where Officer Bad Heart Bull sat sideways in the open passenger door, sweating in his blues, wiping at his face with a big white handkerchief. He braced a hand on the squad’s roof and pulled himself to his feet with some effort, handing Magozzi a blank sign-in sheet.

Gino cocked a brow at him. “You okay, Officer?”

Bully nodded. “Yeah. It’s just the heat—I was getting used to October, then it turned back into July.”

Gino nodded sympathetically. “I hear you. Plus, it’s been kind of a rough day so far.”

Bully sighed and looked down at the ground. “Yeah, it has been. I gotta tell you, those girls really got to me. Christ, they were just babies. Was the world always this ugly, or am I just burning out?”

“The kids always hurt,” Magozzi said, remembering a few of his own past scenes that had made him seriously question his career choice. He scribbled his name on the top line of the sign-in sheet and changed the subject. “We’re here first?”

“Yes, sir. I put the call out for backup and Crime Scene. They should be rolling in soon, and then we’ll start canvassing neighbors. But don’t get your hopes up. The people who live around here don’t sit out in their lawn chairs watching the neighbors; they spend most of their time holed up in their own places. Hear no evil, see no evil kind of thing. In the meantime, I’ve got the kid I partnered with for the house-to-house covering the backyard.” He mopped at his forehead again and gestured them toward the house. “Come on, I’ll take you in before things get crowded.”

From the outside, the house was in tough shape—not unusual for this part of town—and decades worth of previous occupants’ paint choices were flaking off the weather-beaten siding, revealing a rainbow of colors, from white to brown to yellow to Porta Potty aqua. But the wear and tear seemed entirely organic. There wasn’t the standard exterior damage of a gang drive-by, which was the general assumption in this neighborhood. No multiple bullet holes in the structure, no shattered window glass.

Gino looked over at the air conditioner rattling in a front window. “That thing sounds like a jet engine. Loud enough to cover up the sound of gunshots, if we’re talking small caliber.”

“I think we are,” Bully contributed. “I’m no expert, but I would guess a .22 took out those two inside. And Dispatch never got a shots-fired call—I checked.”

Magozzi and Gino walked up to the open door for a look, taking turns, since they couldn’t stand abreast in the narrow doorway, and the splintery frame could have snagged a ton of evidence they didn’t want to mess up. Magozzi asked Bully, “Was this door open when you got here?”

Bully nodded. “Just like it is now. No signs of B and E. They kept the girls in the back room with the shattered doorframe—I had to bust through it. That’s the only thing we touched.”

“Thanks, Bully.”

“You got it. Give me a shout if you need anything.”

Magozzi and Gino entered and walked straight to the bodies on the floor just in front of a sofa, and Magozzi trained a flashlight on the two dead men. Clean shots to each forehead. Precise shots. The minimal damage of a small-caliber weapon, just like Bully had figured. There were no other weapons in sight.

Gino slipped on a glove and dropped to his haunches for a better look and a tentative prod. “They’re not fresh, but they’re not too old, either. What do you think, Somalis?”

“Good guess, from what Bully said about the gangs running girls. Besides, it’s the neighborhood demographic. Any IDs?”

Gino prodded some more, then shook his head. “No wallets on them.”

Magozzi took a cursory glance around the room, then returned his gaze to the position of the bodies. “Somebody surprised them,” he said. “They were sitting on the sofa, somebody came in, they stood up and went down for the count. Didn’t even have time to take a step.”

Gino nodded. “It’s a clean scene; there was some purpose here. No excessive blood, no signs of struggle, no stray bullets shredding the hell out of everything.”

Magozzi looked down at the dirty carpet beneath his feet and saw glittery shards of what looked like plastic. He pointed it out to Gino. “Water bottle silencer?”

Gino stared at the plastic for a moment. “Like I said, there was some purpose here. Whoever it was came here with killing in mind.”

“The shooter knew them.”

“Yeah. Probably some kind of gang-related beef.”

Magozzi turned his attention to a small table next to the sofa. It was littered with old newspapers, plastic cups, and paper plates smeared with dried food. There was a newer laptop resting in sleep mode, a Koran, and disorganized stacks of papers with weird writing that could have been Chinese, Russian, Arabic, or Hebrew, for all of Magozzi’s linguistics expertise.

Gino paused at the table, bent at the waist, and stared at one of those tiny, mass-produced calendars businesses gave out for free. “We can assume these guys were Muslim, right?”

Magozzi moved up behind him. “Well, yeah, probably. There’s a Koran right there. Why?”

“Well, I’m guessing that Muslims don’t celebrate Halloween, but they’ve got about a hundred red circles around the thirty-first of October.”

Magozzi shrugged. “Maybe that was the pickup date for the girls. Maybe it was a dentist appointment. It’s just a date, Gino.”

In the kitchen, they found a knife in the sink. Magozzi thought about Aimee Sergeant, how in her last moments after running for her life, she’d felt her throat being slashed, and wondered if he was looking at a murder weapon.

On the surface, the rest of the house showed them nothing but ratty carpet, bare, flimsy walls with nothing on them, and two naked mattresses without bedding on the floor of one bedroom. No personal items anywhere. The place had a very temporary feeling. They finally got to the last room where the girls had been kept and wished they hadn’t.

Crime Scene showed up a lot faster than they’d been expecting, given the fact that they’d had five bodies at the earlier domestic, Aimee’s scene, and now these two. While Gino made a call to Hennepin County to track down the property owner, Magozzi took Jimmy Grimm on a walk-through, briefed him on the backstory, and pointed out salient things like the knife in the sink, the paperwork and computers, and the room where the girls had been kept. It didn’t take long before his team was crawling all over the house—with Jimmy, you always knew the job would get done, and get done right.

Gino finally got off the phone. “Hennepin County doesn’t have a record of this house being a rental property.”

“Who owns it?”

“You’re gonna love this—a retired Lutheran minister with Alzheimer’s. I talked to his niece—she said it’s been vacant and on the market for almost three years.”

Magozzi looked at the two dead men. “So they were squatting.”

“Looks like it.”

“We need IDs on these vics, Jimmy. There’s got to be something here—passports, ID cards, driver’s licenses. We can’t even see a cell phone anywhere.”

Jimmy pulled out a notebook and sketched out a few notes in big, loopy cursive that seemed so old-fashioned in these days of LOL and IOMW. “You got it. We’ll print them right away, too.”

“Thanks, Jimmy,” Magozzi said, suddenly feeling the strain of the day start to establish painful roots in his back. “We’ll light a fire under Tommy Espinoza and get him down here for the computer forensics. Whatever’s in that computer might not just solve our homicide, it might bust up a seriously ugly vice ring.”

• • •

An hour later,
Magozzi and Gino were sitting on a bench in a city park, not far in distance from their two Little Mogadishu crime scenes, but a universe away as far as atmosphere. They were happily bolting down rubbery hot dogs near the shore of an idyllic pond where ducks and geese floated gracefully. An elderly couple on the other side of the pond was tossing in chunks of bread and stuffing the birds silly.

“Man, that’s the life I want,” Gino said wistfully. “Hang out in a park with Angela all day and feed ducks. Can it get any better than that?”

Magozzi pondered the scene for a moment. “Hell, I hope so.”

Gino actually eked out a small chuckle—no mean feat after the day they’d had so far. “Yeah, maybe I’m setting my standards a little low. Two weeks of this, and I’d probably do something really crazy, like take up macramé.”

Magozzi looked down at his second, half-eaten hot dog, dressed with neon green relish and raw onions that were hot enough to fuel a Formula One car. “This is not a Chicago hot dog. It doesn’t even have casing. It’s like those sad, limp things you get off the rolling steamer at a gas station.”

“Totally agree with you, buddy, but it’s food, and I’m starving,” Gino mumbled, shoving the last half of his second dog into his mouth. “At least they got the relish right.”

Gino’s cell suddenly blatted out a scream—literally. Magozzi gave him a quizzical look, and Gino shrugged. “It’s almost Halloween.” He answered, listened for a few minutes, then said, “Okay. Thanks, Jimmy.”

“What?”

“No IDs in the house. Their prints eventually popped, but in Canada, not the United States. They entered Toronto with Somali passports and did a little border jumping.”

“So they were illegal.”

“Yeah. Tommy has the computer, and he’s trying to round up a translator.”

Magozzi stood up and tossed the rest of his hot dog in the trash. It was time to get back to work.